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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Thank you to so many of you who have sent your inquiries inquiring after our health and safety and status following the path of Hurricane Irma through the state of Florida in the past few days. Thank you for your care and for your concern.

This audio file will be a relatively brief after action report for you sharing our status and welfare and just a little bit of our experience and just my thoughts of what I learned from the storm. The next episode which hopefully will be released concurrently will be back to regularly scheduled personal finance programming.

I'm not entirely certain as to the release schedule of these episodes as we're currently experiencing significant problems with the internet connection, both my primary lines and also my backup plans. Neither of them is working well. So we're going to go to the plan three in order to release the episode.

But hopefully this will get out on the same day that I'm recording it which is Tuesday, September 12, 2017. Unique thing about the internet issues is they all came out after the storm. I didn't have any problems with the internet connection during the storm but here in afterward having internet issues and when you run a business like mine, it's a significant impedance to your work.

The short version of this report is we are well. I am well. My entire family is well. We have experienced minimal problems as a result of Hurricane Irma. Personally we experienced no damage to property. None of our personal property was affected although the property – my landlord's property was affected.

I had some tree limbs blow down, blew some fences down. So that's a frustration but nothing significant. Health-wise we are all well. The major cost of Hurricane Irma for us personally has been the frustration of essentially a lost week of work. In total thus far about eight days of lost productivity for me personally which is frustrating but in the grand scheme of things, obviously I have nothing to be ungrateful for and much to be very grateful for.

Not all of that lost work week was due specifically to hurricane activities although a good bit of it was. Whenever a hurricane comes to town, there are a number of things that need to be done in preparation for the storm. The most obvious one is the personal acquisition of necessary supplies.

That's where the stores are filled with long lines of people lined up for water, for food that is not going to be spoiled if you lose power, flashlights, et cetera, things like that. That process can take a good amount of time, extra time because the lines in stores perhaps lines in gas stations, et cetera.

But realistically speaking, it should only cost perhaps a few hours of time. The significant cost of time in preparing for a hurricane is the cost of preparing your property. So, that includes the obvious things like putting up storm shutters or putting up plywood over your windows to protect your windows from the hurricane winds.

Incidentally, it's specifically the reason you do that is to protect from anything that might be blowing in the wind. Hurricanes will pick up all kinds of stuff and throw them at your window and knock right through. And then there's also the time spent of preparing your property, bringing all your furniture, whatever you can't bring inside, you strap down, you go around and pick up any debris in your yard and try to get all that stuff in the garbage and thrown away from your property as quickly as possible.

So, that's very time-consuming. And then also the time-consuming aspect is just keeping an eye on it and figuring out what the right thing to do is. Should you leave? Should you stay? If you're going to leave, where are you going to go? What direction, et cetera, and then preparing for that event.

And of course, my wife and I, we have three children under four years old and two dogs. So, we're not as nimble as I once was when I was moving just by myself and I could come and go without any restrictions. And in fact, just my family responsibilities were for me the biggest cost of the last week.

And that's what resulted in so much lost productivity for me personally. My wife and our youngest child, our baby, both became pretty sick. My wife very sick for a couple of days. She really wasn't able to do much of anything, stayed in bed most of the time, et cetera.

So that meant that I was functionally a single father with three children under four trying to do hurricane preparations as well. I thought I had a respect for the challenge that single fathers and mothers face in the past, but my respect has been refreshed. I have a new level of respect for how challenging it is to get anything done when you are caring for several little children.

Little children are wonderful creatures, but productivity is not something that they're generally helpers with. You wind up doing most of your work twice over because they undo your work unintentionally and of course sometimes sweet and sometimes obnoxious ways. But they just – even in the best of times, they slow everything down.

Maneuvering with three small children through the store. I shared on the previous episode about going to Costco. I was in the lines with three small children and everything just gets slowed down. Everything becomes more challenging when you are maneuvering with several people. I simply wasn't able to get anything done except constant work with caring for my children, caring for my wife, making sure that she was cared for and then bringing in around the edges the necessary hurricane preparations.

That was very time-consuming. So that just sucked up quite a bit of time. Certainly I had big plans for the last week in terms of what I wanted to get accomplished and I was disappointed to not get those things done. Put me behind on all of my schedule, but I have – I should probably not even bother to say anything about that compared to the challenges that so many people face with destruction to property and small destruction of life.

Thankfully, the impact of Hurricane Irma seems to be significantly less than what was expected. Hurricanes can be unpredictable in that light. Several of you have asked since I led the last show, "Should I stay or should I go?" If we chose to evacuate and if I chose to follow my own advice about evacuate the trouble zone and do it early.

In this case, I hope it's not hypocritical to report that we did not. The big factor was simply my wife's health and then the health of our baby. It's not that nothing was life-threatening, just simply that functionally it was a hard thing to imagine putting her into the car for multiple hours on a multiple trip if it could be avoided.

In terms of the evacuation plan with – Hurricane Irma was unique. Many times with hurricanes, they come in from the coast, the west coast or the east coast and they'll cut across the Florida Peninsula or they'll be moving in that kind of direction. So it's relatively easy to get out of the path of a hurricane.

Fifty miles south, fifty miles north makes a big difference. Even fifty miles west makes a big difference. But with Irma, the forecast track made it challenging to figure out because the entirety of the Florida Peninsula was within the cone of probable approach for much of the days preceding it.

At one point for several days in a row, where we live was directly right in the center of the forecast track, in the center of the cone. So in order to get out of that path and in order to get away from the other people, I couldn't see any solution, any evacuation route that would make sense other than to go significantly to the north.

By my calculations, North Carolina seemed to be about the closest place that would be reasonable where you wouldn't wind up essentially possibly running – probably running from the storm. I know a few people who first went to the north and then to the east a little bit and moved three times to try to get out of the forecast path of the hurricane.

So we had potential plans to go to North Carolina or Alabama or something like that. But with my wife feeling so poorly, it wasn't something that I really wanted to do if it weren't necessary. The risk for hurricanes is often minimal compared to the way that it's reported. For those of you who are observing the national or international news media as your primary source of information regarding hurricanes, it's not that the reporting is inaccurate necessarily, but often it's overhyped and overblown.

My own experience with being a Florida native and hurricanes just simply being a fact of life is you do need to be careful with hurricanes, but there's no reason to freak out. I saw a significant amount of probably over – just too much freak out with regard to Irma, especially with the people.

I didn't feel that – I don't have any complaints about the work of the emergency officials. I think our local emergency management officials did a fine job. Governor Scott, the governor of Florida did a fine job. I have no complaints there. But the way that things are reported is often very confusing.

For example, people talk a lot about evacuation zones and it's easy to get the impression if you consume national media that everybody who's within a cone of error needs to evacuate. I think everyone here down in Florida was pretty much on edge as well after watching Hurricane Harvey for the last week.

Many people were jittery and not logically jittery but just emotionally wound up and emotionally jittery because of what they had observed. There was a lot more fear rather than rationality guiding the day. I'm not saying that the storm was not big. It was historically large, historically powerful and powerful for a historic amount of time.

It was an impressive storm and certainly it needed to be and was taken very seriously. I took it very seriously as we should take everything, every significant event that can cause damage to health and property. We should take those things seriously. It's an awesome – storms are awesome. They're overpoweringly overwhelming and we are essentially impotent in the face of them.

It's a reminder of our own humanity and essential smallness when compared to the power of the cosmos. And yet just because a hurricane is headed your way doesn't necessarily mean that freak out is always warranted. So if you're interested, a few thoughts on that, especially it would be helpful to many of you who are not from Florida.

The category of the storm makes a huge difference. My understanding of the impact of a windstorm is that there is more of an exponential effect of the damage as the winds increase, not just a cumulative effect. A category five storm is not 30% worse than a category three storm in terms of its potential damage.

It is – it's much, much worse in terms of what those higher winds can actually do to structures and to property and to lives as well. So on that account, Hurricane Irma was a very strong storm and needed to be paid careful attention to with regard to that. But even so, as a category five hurricane, the major risks for hurricane damage from winds really only comes to people who are in poorly built structures.

So there are a few people who have to pay very careful attention to wind loads and those things are number one if you live in a makeshift structure, live in a mobile home, live in an RV or live in a poorly built or old wooden house without any of the modern windstorm construction methods.

For example, strapping of roof trusses, proper – just things that are done to hold the house properly together. Here in Florida, we – all of the trusses are fully strapped to the walls on new construction. There's a – all of the codes as far as the number of nails that need to be held in an asphalt shingle are significantly higher than they are in other states.

And so if you live in a modern structure, you can be confident that the house is built for a higher wind load than an older structure. So when I looked at our own situation and tried to make that fresh decision of evacuation, the house that we live in is not necessarily the newest and the greatest but it's not a weak or poorly built structure.

And so the primary plan was just simply to change from where we are to another structure of a friend or family member that is newer, more modern, built out of concrete instead of out of wood, et cetera, meets all the current hurricane codes. If you do that and you're not in a zone of concern with water, in general, you can ride out just about any hurricane.

At any point in time, you may have some tornado threat that comes in a hurricane. But much of the major damage from hurricanes, it happens either in poorly built structures, rip a mobile home park apart for example, or from tornado damage on one side of the hurricane. A tornado damage is very hard to predict.

So the first layer of hurricane concern, of wind concern for me is always am I going to be in a structure that sound given the size and power of the storm? And I have a number of friends and family members who have new modern structures that are perfectly adequate to take shelter in.

And that was what we were planning to do as a primary course of action. So my point is if you live in a modern house, not in an old or weak or inadequate structure like a mobile home for a hurricane, if you live in a modern house, hurricanes aren't quite so terrible as they're often reported on the national media.

Second thing reflecting wind concerns has to do with the width of the storm. A hurricane when it talks about, when they talk about a category five storm or something like that, the actual impact of the hurricane winds, those highest of winds is severe. But it's only the most severe in a relatively narrow swath close to the storm.

I think the hurricane force winds of this storm only went out something like 70 miles from the eye, something like that. So realistically, it's a relatively small area as the storm moves at which the hurricane force winds are the highest and the most intense. Where I live here on the East Coast, we were affected by the hurricane winds, but not affected by the strongest of winds.

And so when you're thinking about a hurricane evacuation plan, it's important to keep that in mind. 30 miles to the north, 30 miles to the east, even in this storm, it made a 20-mile jog that made a big difference in its impact to the property over on the West Coast of Florida.

So these small movements can make a big difference in terms of any danger. The other aspect of hurricanes is always water and the water is twofold. Number one, it's rainfall and flooding events in areas that are prone to flooding. If you live in an area that's prone to flooding, a neighborhood that's prone to flooding, that needs to be taken carefully because flooding kills more people every year than almost any other natural disaster.

So this would be what would apply to a city that is built in a low-lying area, a city like a Hurricane Katrina, a city like New Orleans or a city like Houston or any other city that's low-lying and is prone to flooding. That needs to be taken seriously. Or if you're in a neighborhood that's in a flood zone.

The other aspect of hurricanes is storm surge, water that's pushed in from the ocean, pushed in from the lake, pushed in from the waterways and rises to a high level and gives localized flooding. So if I lived in a flood zone or if I lived in a storm surge zone here on the East Coast of Florida, then I would always leave.

I would always leave that property because that's hard to defend against. It's one thing to get an adult out of a flood. It's another thing to get three small children out of a flood. So those things don't apply to us and those were some of the reasons why we didn't evacuate immediately.

As we watched it, as my wife became – started to feel better and as we watched the storm track, we wound up actually just staying right at home. And for her comfort and for our children's comfort, that wound up being the best decision and I'm satisfied with it. We were ready to go.

So I felt confident that with being ready to go, we could be on the road and we could – if we needed to get out, we could. But given the constraints at hand, I think we made a good decision. Feel like I had to give that defense because I felt a little hypocritical doing a show on evacuation and then a week – and evacuating early and a week later, not evacuating.

But I don't see any inconsistency. I'll have to listen to both my shows and make sure that there's nothing in my commentary that is inconsistent. I did learn some important lessons for myself and some of my own – the holes in my own planning and preparation for hurricanes or events like that and kind of did a little mini after-action review to understand what went well and what didn't go well.

Probably the biggest impact for me, the biggest lesson I'll share with you – of course, some lessons are private. I don't wish to share them publicly. But the biggest lesson that I learned is one of the benefits of being prepared for an event like a hurricane in advance is it allows you to have more margin, more capacity to handle when things are really tough.

It was really tough to have my wife sick and generally, I have a good amount of support, family and friends that can help out. But of course, with the hurricane going on, everyone else has their own responsibilities. We don't often get to choose the – we don't get to choose the emergencies that hit us and we don't get to choose sometimes how the emergencies pile up.

Being sick is ordinarily an annoyance but it's a much more severe annoyance if it comes at the time of a hurricane. So I underestimated the impact of that and I was glad that I wasn't caught entirely red-handed. I wasn't caught without having any hurricane preparations in place. So I was able to care for my wife and I was able to care for our children.

I also learned a lot about just the impact of tiredness. Our baby – there's nothing life-threatening about his sickness but he's not sleeping well. So you put him down in his crib and he doesn't stay asleep even with multiple times. So we wound up for two or three nights just taking shifts of sleeping with him in a chair and I don't sleep well sitting upright in a chair and that leads to tiredness.

Crankiness and that's where I'd be very careful. Am I still making good decisions in the middle of being tired? And so it just made me realize that oftentimes the value of having money and financial preparations, the value of having an emergency fund is often not that you can't get through an emergency without money but you can get through an emergency with less stress.

People get through their emergencies all the time even when they don't have money. But the stress is often very, very impactful and that stress has a wearing effect. It has a wearing effect in their own lives, their own health. The stress causes health problems in the long term, has an effect on their relationships and on their general sense of life.

And so having something as simple as an emergency fund lowers the stress level and it doesn't mean that you don't go through the problems but it means your experience of problems is often different. Similar thing with something like hurricane preparations or maybe it's winter blizzard preparations. If you have hurricane supplies on hand at the beginning of hurricane season, then the experience of the hurricane is less stressful.

I had actually planned that I was going to have a very productive week even with all the hurricane preps. Yeah, a few hours here and there but I had planned to have a productive week. That was just simply shot by the sickness in my family. Would have been far worse if I was stressed about picking up a case of water to ride out the storm in that context.

And so I realized just afresh that a lot of times the reason it's important to prepare for something like a hurricane is it maximizes the enjoyment, allows you to focus on things that matter. And if it's not enjoyment, at least it allows you to minister to the people that you care about, allows me to care for my wife to the best of my ability and make sure that she's well cared for.

And I always have to use the opportunity to talk myself down off the wall. I'm a very kind of output-focused person. I want to get stuff done, check stuff off. I don't enjoy just being. I wasn't able to turn my computer on for about three days because there was no opportunity to do so.

I like to work on my computer when my children are around. And so just was with them, caring for them. And I just was reminded afresh. It's one thing to talk about, "Hey, I want to spend time with family." It's another thing to say, "Okay, I'm going to spend time with family even if it costs me, and I'm not getting the things done that I had planned to be done with." So that is my report for you, my friends.

I share that out of a sense of personal camaraderie, knowing that many of you will enjoy that, enjoying hearing a little bit of what I've learned and to share a little bit of my story. Thank you for listening, and I'll be back soon with regular Radical Personal Finance personal finance content.

This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and save. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit SDG&E.com/FERA to find out more.